Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy

by Jonah Goldberg

  Ultimately, the question of whether polarization in American politics breeds tribal thinking or tribal thinking breeds polarization can only be answered with “Both.” But what is clear is that a large amount of Trump’s support, in the election and to this day, stems from a desire to fight fire with fire. In hundreds of arguments, conversations, and debates with Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters—and many of his reluctant ones—the loudest refrain is that we live with Trump or we die with Hillary. For the true believers, this was an exciting choice. For the more skeptical ones, it was a lamentable but necessary one. The traditional American conservative vision of limited government and free markets had passed its sell-buy date. The choice now is progressivism or nationalism.

  Progressivism, in other words, conjured a nationalist backlash that is less an alternative to the statism of the left and more a right-wing version of it. We should take a moment to look at how it happened.

  There’s a deep confusion within progressivism. On the one hand, progressives take deep pride in their role as agents of “social change.” Often they have every reason to be proud. If you believe in the causes of, say, civil rights and feminism, why wouldn’t you celebrate your accomplishments? But at the same time, progressives want to claim that any effort to resist the forces of “progress” is an act of aggression in the culture war. From abortion and gay marriage to the hot fad for transgender rights, progressives want every institution and community to bend the knee to their movement. And when anyone refuses, the resisters are cast as the aggressors.

  The slogan “Make America Great Again” worked on many levels because it is so diversely interpretable. But a key part of Trump’s “MAGA” appeal was the notion that we could return to a simpler—often mythological—time where middle-class jobs dangled from the trees like ripe fruit, the police had a free hand to deal with troublemakers, and “political correctness” didn’t ruin everyone’s fun. “MAGA,” particularly when adorned with all of the other nationalist and populist rhetoric, fell in the great Herdian tradition of conjuring myths of an imagined past where “we the [right] people” weren’t humiliated by foreigners at home or abroad.

  Even among the ranks of Trump-supporting conservatives who understood he was in all likelihood selling snake oil, this mind-set won the argument. Michael Anton, a multimillionaire hedge fund partner and part-time intellectual who now works for the Trump administration, wrote a famous pseudonymous essay for the Claremont Review of Books titled “The Flight 93 Election.” In it, he argued that America was essentially doomed if Hillary Clinton was elected. So, like the passengers who overpowered the terrorists on 9/11, there was no choice but to back Trump. Selfless courage was required (but not so much courage as to risk losing his job by publishing under his own name).33 This argument was widely subscribed to by many leading conservatives, even many who had once been passionate opponents of Trump. The imperial arrogance of progressive social engineers and social justice warriors had earned an apocalyptic backlash so powerful that even clear-eyed conservatives who recognized Trump’s dishonesty and demagoguery couldn’t resist it. Indeed, as much as I hold Trump in contempt, I am still compelled to admit that, if my vote would have decided the election, I probably would have voted for him.

  “Make America Great Again” captured the spirit of the backlash. It invoked nostalgic claims about trade, foreign policy, crime, culture, and economics. But the most salient and illustrative platform of the Trump agenda was immigration.

  The Swiss writer Max Frisch famously said of the guest workers his country imported that “we wanted workers, but we got people instead.”34 That insight applies most poignantly to Europe. The massive influx of immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia had the predictable consequence, testing national and local institutions and giving rise to huge spikes in populism and calls for more authoritarianism.

  Many on the left concede that immigration is fueling a populist backlash, but they then take the position that the backlash is racist and bigoted and therefore politically illegitimate. No doubt mass immigration elicits racist and other bigoted attitudes in some segments of the population. But relying on these sorts of explanations encourages a kind of smug virtue signaling: People who don’t like immigration are backward bigots—unlike me.

  Such responses not only miss the complexity of the issue but also encourage further resentment among the segments of society being demonized. In a sense, it is a kind of victim blaming. For instance, at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, work is far more often a matter of physical labor. If you have little or no education, working with your hands is usually your only option. Importing large numbers of competitors who keep wages down—or are perceived to be doing so—is not going to be celebrated by day laborers with nearly the gusto that one hears from journalists and the well-heeled. If we started importing very large numbers of pundits who could do the same job as the editors of the New York Times for half the price, one might find a bit more nuance in their pages.

  I tend to believe that high levels of immigration, particularly skills-based immigration, are economically desirable policies. Also, the evidence that low-skilled immigration is a net detriment to the country is not as cut-and-dried as some claim. (The field of economics that studies immigration is shot through with methodological and ideological problems.)35 But the simple fact is that, as with trade and automation, all economic policies create winners and losers. Proponents of very large levels of immigration almost invariably tend to be in the winners column, and a dismayingly high proportion of them also tend to be condescendingly dismissive of the complaints of the losers. When I talk to wealthy audiences, I will often point out that the people in the room only know two kinds of immigrants: extremely hardworking manual laborers who tend to do their landscaping or clean their homes and offices, and extremely hardworking and highly educated wealthy “citizens of the world” like themselves. In neither instance do the members of the audience have any reason to feel threatened by immigrants, economically or culturally. (Their children will not be going to the overwhelmed public schools of the day laborers, and if the children of affluent immigrants attend their children’s private schools, all the better: “Diversity” is a wonderful thing.) Being rich can mean being able to afford generosity at someone else’s expense.

  Regardless, it’s a mistake to put all the emphasis on economic arguments about immigration. Economists are very good at describing the world through models, but they tend to downgrade, dismiss, or demonize the cultural and psychological costs of immigration. So when it comes to immigration, economists talk about workers, labor costs, productivity, and all manner of costs and benefits. But those models are silent on all the other costs and benefits—social cohesion, civic and institutional health, community trust—that are difficult to quantify.

  But it’s not impossible. A recent paper by Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and Pippa Norris of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that the bulk of the evidence points to the rise of populism in America and Europe having more to do with “cultural backlash” than economic dislocation.36 Their cultural backlash theory includes issues other than immigration. Feminism, gay rights, and other forms of progressive change are part of the psychological mix. But there’s reason to believe that immigration is probably the biggest driver of cultural backlash in populist strongholds.

  A recent study by researchers at the London School of Economics found that, while levels of unemployment didn’t correlate very tightly with populist support for Brexit, levels of immigration did. An earlier 2012 study found that opposition to immigration had less to do with economic concerns than worries about what newcomers would do to “the composition of the local population” and how it would affect “their neighborhoods, schools and workplaces.”37

  A lot of the political science literature on this topic is replete with ad hominem labels (or technically neutral labels used in ad homine
m ways): “racism,” “xenophobia,” “nativism,” “bigotry,” “isolationism,” etc. And while it is tragically true that it is easy to find examples to back up such descriptors, the tragedy is compounded when we use these terms as a blanket condemnation of anyone who has objections to mass-scale immigration. In other words, all racist xenophobes and white supremacists are opposed to immigration, but not all immigration opponents are racists and xenophobes. National Review magazine has been at the forefront of those arguing that if responsible politicians don’t deal with the legitimate concerns of voters with regard to immigration, the issue will be taken up by irresponsible politicians—because, in the minds of voters, they are the only ones talking about the problem. The 2016 election proved us right.

  Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration during the campaign was like a mirror of the most cartoonish platitudes of the left. While pro-immigration absolutists scoff at any suggestion that immigrants are anything other than the noblest of Americans, Trump often painted immigrants—particularly illegal immigrants—as the dregs of humanity. For instance, Hillary Clinton said that Islam has “nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”38 And Donald Trump, by vowing to ban all Muslims (at least initially), made it clear that he thinks Islam has everything to do with terrorism. The same dynamic played itself out with his constant invocation of the statistically unrepresentative number of crimes committed by illegal immigrants. This rhetorical tactic helped Trump in two ways. First, he demagogically played on the natural tribal instinct of fear of others. But second, he signaled that he was willing to defy the “politically correct” rules of the “weak” and “stupid” establishment.

  In other words, the left painted with a broad brush in a single color and so did Trump. And when that happens, there is no room for the shading and contrasts necessary to describe the world as it actually is. One scholar who has tried is Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam, a decent left-wing liberal who is arguably America’s leading social scientist on civil society and community. In a massive survey of over 30,000 Americans, he found that there was an undeniable correlation between increased diversity and breakdowns in community. He is adamant that racism isn’t the primary explanation. (In fact, supporters of the idea that racism is the primary driver of anti-immigrant sentiment have never paid much attention to the immigration controversies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or the anti-immigrant sentiments in Africa and the Middle East in which race plays no role.)

  According to Putnam, people who live in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”39

  In short, he writes, “People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”40 Putnam hated his findings and recognized that they would not be well received by his peers. So he spent a year retesting the numbers for some other explanations. He couldn’t find any.

  In ethnically or culturally homogenous communities, there is more social trust and more social capital. People who share languages, customs, faiths, institutions, and plain old history are simply more likely to work out their differences and problems without looking to the government to do it for them. In short, a shared culture builds trust, which is essential to democracy and economic growth. “Trust,” writes Francis Fukuyama, “is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of members of that community.”41

  Think of the typical postcard hamlet in Europe, where kids dress in communal garb, parents organize festivals, and everyone goes to the same church. Is it any wonder that there would be a larger reservoir of social trust and cooperativeness in such a community than in a diverse city full of strangers and newcomers? Sweden and other Scandinavian countries have been the beau ideal of American progressives for generations. What has been hard for those same progressives to grapple with is that ethnic homogeneity and a strong cultural consensus make social democracy much easier to pull off. One can say, without fear of contradiction, that the influx of immigrants and refugees into these countries—and others, like Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, France, etc.—has not contributed to greater social peace.

  There is no value judgment here. Traditional small-town life can be wonderful. It can also be stultifying for those who want something more—or merely something else. The Medieval German expression Stadtluft macht frei (“City air makes you free”) captured this distinction. Moving to the city has always meant escaping from the more ordered and tradition-bound ways of rural life.

  The customs—festivals, May Day dances, whatever—of traditional communities aren’t merely quaint cultural activities; they are circuits of social trust, solidarity, and cooperation. It is right and good to value inclusiveness. But inclusiveness can go only so far and do so much. Christians can visit a mosque, but they probably can’t pray there regularly. People who speak Korean are simply going to have a hard time forging relationships with people who don’t.

  The share of the foreign-born U.S. population is at its all-time high. In 1960 the foreign-born population was obviously smaller in absolute terms and as a share of the country, but it also overwhelmingly consisted of immigrants from Europe and Canada (84 percent), people who have an easier time assimilating into the majority culture.42 Mexicans made up 6 percent of the foreign-born population, and other Latin Americans another 3.5 percent, for a total of 9.5 percent of the foreign-born population. In 2014, 27.7 percent came from Mexico and another 23.9 percent from other Latin American countries.43 Of the 48 million students enrolled in K-12 public schools in 2012, nearly one in four spoke a language other than English at home.44

  People often note that we’ve had similar proportions of foreign-born students in public schools before (though we are in uncharted territory when it comes to the absolute numbers). They cite the success immigrants who came through Ellis Island had at finding and achieving the American dream. That is a great story and one that I love. What they leave out is that in those days America at the state, local, and federal levels was absolutely determined to turn immigrants into Americans. Sometimes that effort was too draconian—as in World War I—when German speakers were essentially persecuted for even speaking their native language in public.*2 But the schools, churches, and popular culture had both the tools and the will to encourage assimilation.

  Today, all of the will is on the other side of the equation. There is a large and aggressive educational and political lobby that works against assimilation and strives to create ever more incentives for immigrants—as well as native-born ethnic groups—to maintain their minority identity at all costs.

  Assimilation is still popular among many immigrants and many native-born Americans. But it is on the outs precisely where it is most needed. In the University of California system, an administration memo cautions faculty and staff not to use certain language that can lead to “micro-aggressions”—which the UC system defines as “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.” One example of an offensive, hostile, or derogatory statement: saying “America is a melting pot.” This sends the signal that the speaker expects minorities to “assimilate to the dominant culture.”45

  Well, yeah.

  Whatever your preferred policy on immigration might be—my own is to simply have one and enforce it—it should be remembered that fear and distrust of strangers is entirely natural. I do not like the demagoguery and d
emonization of immigrants that is thriving on the right these days, but the fact is that such responses are a feature of human nature. That doesn’t excuse overt acts of bigotry or cruelty, but it should at least instill a little humility and empathy in people who think “nativism” is nothing more than know-nothingism. Many of the people concerned with immigration know something far better than their critics do: Their communities are changing in ways they do not like.

  Donald Trump tapped into the frustrations of millions of people fed up with the failed promises of politicians who said they would do something about the problem. I don’t like how he did it, and I think he will ultimately fail in fulfilling most of his promises—probably resulting in even more populist anger. But that doesn’t mean the concerns he tapped into were wholly illegitimate.

  Again, polarization fuels these trends and these trends fuel polarization.

  To understand how, it’s important to understand the degree to which the erosion of civil society has caused millions of Americans to flock to partisan politics as a source of tribal meaning. Political parties in America were not always particularly ideological. If someone told you she was a Republican or a Democrat in, say, 1950, you would need more information before you could guess whether she was a conservative or a liberal. There were very progressive Republicans and there were very conservative Democrats. But in the last few decades, starting in the 1960s and intensifying with almost every passing year, the parties have become not only more ideological but tribal. “Today, political parties are no longer just the people who are supposed to govern the way you want. They are a team to support, and a tribe to feel a part of. And the public’s view of politics is becoming more and more zero-sum: It’s about helping their team win, and making sure the other team loses,” writes Amanda Taub, who covers social science for the New York Times.46